SOON after Torquemada established a tribunal of the Holy Office in Toledo, a
resident Converso appeared before the newly appointed Inquisitors to make a
voluntary confession of his many sins.

I, Juan Alvarez of Seville, (he began) silk worker and resident of this
city of Toledo in the parish of San Roman, kiss the sacred hands of Your Reverend
Lordships and present myself before you with the greatest contrition and grief
of soul, to confess and make manifest my guilt and the sins which I have
committed against our Lord and Redeemer Jesus Christ, and against His Holy
Faith.

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Twenty five years before, when Juan Alvarez was a mere boy, his father sent him
to Seville as an apprentice to a Jewish silversmith named Mayr Abenbilla. The
latter not only initiated young Juan into the mysteries of silversmithing but
also into all the ceremonies of the Law of Moses. Since he was so young and
plastic, Juan Alvarez soon was convinced that he could never be saved outside the
Mosaic Law and although still nominally a Christian he began to live like a Jew.
After three years of this he became an apprentice to a milliner in Seville. The
latter, who posed in public as a Christian, practiced Judaism in secret and
encouraged Juan-who, of course, needed no encouraging-to continue in his evil
ways. From Seville he moved on to Cordova where he lived for a time with another
Converso and his wife, all three of them happily practicing Judaism while passing
as Christians.

Five years ago Juan returned to Toledo where he was happy to discover that the
city was full of Conversos living as Jews behind closed doors. These included
his father, mother and four brothers, their friends and neighbors, as well as
Juan's various employers, fellow-workers and all of their friends and neighbors.
He was soon caught up in a round of Passover celebrations, Jewish prayer
meetings, wakes for the dead, Hebrew dietary delights of food and wine, and all
the other paraphernalia by which wicked Conversos testify to their attachment to
the Law of Moses.

He finally settled down in a house of his own, with a Converso girl who had two
young children by a husband who was permanently out of town. Together the new

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lovers ate unleavened bread, took ceremonial baths, cut the fat from meat, burned
candles on Friday night, put on clean clothes for Saturday, fasted on Jewish Fast
Days, eschewed Christian meats and fish without scales, celebrated Lent by
elaborately ignoring it, attended Jewish wakes, entertained their backsliding
Converso friends, ran an underground railroad for fugitives from the Inquisition,
and raised their children to be bad Christians.

By the time he finished his confession, Juan Alvarez had denounced all his
friends, employers, co-workers and neighbors, in addition to his common-law wife,
his two stepchildren, his mother, father, and all his brothers.
He did this, he said, because he had now seen the Christian light. He grieved for
his sins. His heart was filled with repentance. He wanted only to be clasped to
the bosom of the True Faith, reposing in bliss in the outstretched arms of the
Redeemer.

Juan Alvarez had come forth voluntarily under the Edict of Grace, which promised
Inquisitorial mercy to all Conversos who purged themselves without prompting.
This was an operational procedure established by Torquemada early in the
Inquisitorial game. By promising mercy to those who told all, it traded on the
common human fears which guarantee success to organized persecution everywhere.
Soon after his elevation as Inquisitor General, Torquemada outlined elaborate
instructions designed to facilitate the apprehension of derelict Christians.
Wherever a new tribunal was established, the Inquisitors were to publish. an
Edict of Grace, allowing an interval of thirty to forty days,

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so that all persons. both men and women, who find themselves guilty of any sin or
heresy or apostasy, or of practicing or observing the rites or ceremonies of the
Jews, or of any others whatsoever, which are contrary to the Christian religion,
may come forward and make manifest and confess their errors in full, and
further confess all they know and remember about the said crime regarding both
themselves and other persons who may have fallen into the said
error.

Those who cooperated, Torquemada promised, would be exempted from the penalties
of death, life imprisonment, and full property confiscation usually reserved for
the obstinate. They could expect instead a charitable reception and some kind of
fine, as well as a penance for therapeutic purposes, in keeping with the wish of
their Catholic Majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella, to extend clemency to all those
who sincerely hungered for reconciliation to the True Faith.

Included in Torquemada's instructions, however, was a warning to anyone who
thought he could cheat justice by making any old kind of confession. He had to
tell all he knew, not only about himself but about everybody else, including
members of his own family down to minor children. If it was later discovered that
a penitent sinner had held back any information, his reconciliation to the Faith
was automatically invalid and he was to be dealt with as an impenitent heretic,
i.e., eminently eligible for roasting. Those heretics, of course, who failed to
take advantage of the Edict of Grace, were

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ineligible for any of its benefits and were to be regarded as contumacious
deceivers to be prosecuted with full Inquisitorial rigor.

As an economical method of collecting evidence against heretics, the Edict of
Grace left little to be desired. Upwards of a thousand people came forward and
confessed at Valencia. In Toledo the number approached three thousand, and the
tribunals in smaller towns counted them in the hundreds-all within the brief
period of thirty to forty days. However, as a method of preserving human dignity,
the Edict of Grace left everything to be desired. Self-confessed Judaizers raked
over their past lives, baring every shabby detail they could think of, grovelling
and degrading themselves in their anxiety to impress the Inquisitors with their
sincerity. In addition to self-denunciation, they wallowed in orgies of
accusation against others. Servants denounced their masters; the poor denounced
the rich; husbands and wives, sweethearts and lovers denounced each other;
friends denounced friends; neighbors denounced neighbors; parents denounced their
children and children denounced their parents.

The case of one Brianda de Bardaxi will serve as one of many such examples of
these dismal exercises in fear and hatred. Brianda, a Converso of Saragossa, was
on bad terms with her mother Salvadora, who thought Brianda had received too
large a share of the family property. Mother Salvadora was supported in this
opinion by her daughter-in-law, an elderly widow named Aldonza, who felt that she
also had been short-changed for the benefit of Brianda. Between the two of
them

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these disgruntled ladies managed to nag Brianda to desperate measures. When the
Inquisition came to Saragossa, Brianda hurried over to announce that when she was
five years old, she had seen her mother and sister-in-law fast on a Jewish
holiday.

Mother Salvadora and sister Aldonza were immediately jailed. They had no doubts
about who had put them there; they confessed to observing some Jewish Fast days,
and swore that Brianda had taken part in them also. Meanwhile, more of Brianda's
enemies were adding to her troubles. A former neighbor, with whom Brianda had
been feuding for some years, had been seized by the Holy Office as a Judaizer.
ill his confession he claimed that Brianda was also secretly a Jew, and was
supported in his accusation by his wife and two daughters, who didn't like
Brianda either.

Proceedings were immediately begun against Brianda, who was obviously made of
sterner stuff than her accusers. All the Inquisitors could get out of her, under
repeated questioning, was the admission that when she was about five years old
she had taken an occasional bite of unleavened bread. Except for that one
childhood indiscretion, she insisted, she had never been other than a good
Christian. She also presented a parade of witnesses who testified to the bad
blood between Brianda and her accusers, and swore to her exceptionally fervent
Christian character: she lived like a nun; she prayed at least an hour every day;
she often wore a hair shirt, and she ate fat and lard with obvious gusto.

Clearly, somebody was lying. Torquemada's men, like their chief, automatically
assumed that it was the accused.

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So the Inquisitors of Saragossa resorted to that sure solvent of all doubts-the
machinery of torture. Brianda was spread-eagled on a trestle, her head lower than
her feet, her arms and legs tightly bound with cords. The cords were then twisted
with a winch, cutting deep corrugations in the flesh and producing the most
intense agony. When Brianda still gasped out her innocence, the water torture was
added to encourage her to tell the truth. While she was still bound to the
trestle, her nostrils were plugged and a stream of water was poured down her
throat, stopping just short of complete strangulation. After an hour and a half
of
this, Brianda cracked and blurted out a tolerably ample confession to the effect
that she had been a secret Judaizer for years. Three days later she revoked her
confession, asserting that it was all a lie extracted by torture. So back to the
torture chamber she went, but just as her treatment was about to start, Brianda
fainted dead away. Unable to revive her, the frustrated Inquisitors had her
carried back to her cell.

After four years in an Inquisition dungeon, with torture for diversion, the only
firm cooperation the Inquisitors were able to get from Brianda was the admission
that she had nibbled unleavened bread at the age of five. She was therefore
pronounced to be "vehemently suspect" of Judaizing, was forced to abjure her
heresies ill a public Auto de Fe, and to pay a fine consisting of one third of
all her property. Since the modern apologists for the Inquisition assure us that
it was not really as bad as the "prejudiced" historians say it was, we like to
think that some good came out of the trial of Brianda de Bardaxi.

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Perhaps the Inquisition, by appropriating a sizable chunk of Brianda's property,
restored harmony in the family hitherto rent by inequalities in the distribution
of wealth which had now been leveled out by the Holy Office. In his instructions
regarding the Edict of Grace, Torquemada was careful to provide for the reopening
of a case against any reconciled person whose confession was later discovered to
be unsatisfactory. The circumstances under which such action could be taken were
described by Torquemada in these words:

If some person or persons among those who come forward do not confess the ENTIRE
truth regarding everything they know about themselves or about others in
connection with the crime of heresy, ESPECIALLY IN SERIOUS AND OUTSTANDING
MATTERS AND CRIMES. it is presumed that they gained reconciliation through
deception.

The proper application of these instructions might vex the ingenuity of a
Solomon. In Torquemada's day they were often nor more than an excuse to stoke the
fires. There are numerous instances of self-confessed penitents who, after having
been reconciled, were later retried and then burned at the stake on the ground
that they had deliberately withheld important information from the Inquisitors.
In some cases the charge was very likely justified, but in a great many others
the Inquisitors tempered justice with no quarter. Two examples, from among the
many cases of this kind, illustrate the pattern.

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When the Edict of Grace was proclaimed in Ciudad Real, a great many of the town's
residents came forward to denounce either themselves or their friends, or both.
So prolific were these revelations that in the two short years of its
existence-before its transfer to the larger metropolitan center of Toledo-the
tribunal at Ciudad Real burned almost three hundred Judaizers, in person or in
effigy (depending on which was available), and reconciled some two hundred
more.

Among the earliest arrivals at Inquisition headquarter s was one Maria Pampano,
with a tale about a husband who was a heretic and a brute. When she married Juan
Pampano twenty five years before, he was a perfectly good Christian. But after
they had been married for about nine years, her husband suddenly announced that
henceforth he intended to live like a Jew and he expected Maria to do likewise.
However, Maria refused, for she had been raised as a good Christian and never
entertained the terrible thought of being anything else. But husband Juan was
determined, and life in the Pampano household turned into a prolonged reign of
terror. He forced Maria to live like a Jew and he beat her unmercifully when she
protested. After six years of this, to Maria's relief, husband Juan left her and
dropped out of sight. About four years later he turned up on her doorstep,
begging her to come away with him. She refused even to let him in the house, so
he went away and she never saw him again. Now she wished to confess her sins of
many years ago and to state that, under violent pressure from her husband, she
had (1) refrained from working on Saturdays, (2) prepared Saturday's food on
Friday, (3) eaten this

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food on Saturday, (4) eaten meat prepared Jewish style, and (5) baked unleavened
bread and eaten it. Also, Maria confessed, after her husband had left her, she
had through force of habit continued "for a while" to observe the Jewish
Sabbath. She soon came to her senses, however, confessed her sin to a priest, and
for the last nine or ten years had always lived like a good Christian.
This confession seemed honest enough, so Maria Pampano was forgiven by the
Inquisitors and formally reconciled to the True Faith. 'Two months later, to her
astonishment and horror, she was in jail and on trial for her life as an
impenitent heretic. It seems that some of her neighbors had also made confessions
under the Edict of Grace. Several of them had, among a great many other things,
confirmed the accusations which Maria had already made against herself. However,
a former servant in the Pampano household, who had a sharp eye for unorthodox
details, enumerated a number of examples of Maria's Judaizing habits which the
latter had not specifically itemized in her own confession.

Maria was now formally charged with making a fraudulent confession and with being
a steal thy dissembler and obstinate heretic with a heart hardened against the
True Faith. The Inquisition prosecutor therefore asked that she be relaxed for
burning on the ground that she had not included in her confession the following
admissions:

(1) She refrained from working on Saturdays.
(2) She gave the Jewish ceremonial bath to her newborn children.
(3) She indoctrinated her children in the Law of Moses.

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(4) She ate chicken during Lent.
(5) She participated in Jewish prayer sessions at home.
(6) She observed the Jewish Passover.

Maria pointed out - correctly- that she had already confessed to the first
charge. The second, third and fourth charges she flatly denied. As for the last
two, she protested that they were implicit in her own confession that she had
been forced by her husband to observe many Jewish customs. If she failed to
specify every last detail, she begged the Inquisitors to consider that her crimes
covered a period of ten to twenty years before, and that she was bound to forget
some things.

To substantiate her claims of innocence, Maria called on some of her neighbors as
character witnesses. They proved to be a sorry lot: three of them had known Maria
only a few years, and although nice things about her, the Inquisitors were only
interested in her activities long before then. The other two witnesses met the
time requirement, but they were obviously so frightened in the face of the
dreaded Inquisition that their testimony did Maria as much harm as good. The
first one, a neighbor lady, when asked by the Inquisitors :if Maria observed the
Lenten season, replied with excruciating caution. She remembered, she said, that
once or twice in the thirty years she had known Maria, the latter had borrowed a
head covering from her because, so she had said, she wanted to take her daughter
to confession. However, this witness hastened to add that she never actually saw
Maria's daughter at confession. Then, when the Inquisitors wanted to know whether
the witness had

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ever seen Maria observe the Jewish Sabbath, she said she did not know, although
there were times when she felt 'slightly suspicious' about that matter.

The other witness was Maria's godson. All he would say was that he had seen his
godmother go to church to hear mass, and ignore the Jewish Sabbath by working.
But when the Inquisitors asked him about the other charges against her, Maria's
godson, although he had known her intimately all his life, could only repeat over
and over that he knew nothing about anything that ever went on inside his
godmother's house.

The Inquisitors were satisfied that Maria Pampano was guilty as charged. In a
public Auto de Fe early in 1484 she was formally declared to be a deceiver,
dissembler, false penitent, secret Judaizer, heretic and apostate, and was burned
to ashes.

At almost the same time that Maria Pampano was getting married to the man whose
religious idiosyncrasies were to bring her to the stake, a young widow named
Beatriz Nunez was leaving Ciudad Real to seek her marital fortunes in nearby
Guadalupe. Beatriz had been born and raised in Ciudad Real in a family of secret
Judaizers. There she had married a Converso of similar habits and raised a small
family of two sons, both of whom Beatriz and her husband indoctrinated in the
Mosaic mysteries.

When her first husband died in 1465, Beatriz moved to Guadalupe where she married
again and began raising a second family, There was, at that time, no Spanish
Inquisition; Torquemada was still savoring his dreams of purification in the
cloister at Segovia. However, in

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1465 there was a brief flareup of persecution under Henry IV of Castile, urged on
by Alonso de Espina and some of his clerical colleagues. Beatriz Nunez had hardly
settled down in Guadalupe with her new husband when he was seized by the local
authorities as a secret Judaizer and after some time in prison was given a stiff
fine and admonished to mend his ways.

Some eighteen years later, when the Inquisition set about purging Ciudad Real, a
number of Beatriz' hometown friends and relatives, including her first husband
and one of her sons, were burned-the quick in person and the dead in effigy.

If Beatriz had any hopes of escaping the Inquisition by remaining in Guadalupe,
such hopes were quickly dashed. A little over a year after the tribunal opened at
Ciudad Real, another one was established in Guadalupe. If the one at Ciudad Real
was rigorous, the branch at Guadalupe was ferocious. Doctor Francisco Sanchez was
sent over from Ciudad Real to lend his experience to efficient operations at
Guadalupe. He was placed under the authority of the prior of the local Geronomite
monastery, friar Nuno de Arevalo, whose determination to cauterize the sores of
Judaism more than compensated for his lack of experience. In the few short months
of its operation, before the Guadalupe tribunal was absorbed by its big brother
in Toledo, seven Autos de Fe were held in the macabre setting of the cemetery in
front of friar Nuno's monastery. In all, fifty three men and women were burned
alive, including a monk from friar Nuno's own cloister. Forty six corpses were
dug up and burned. The effigies of twenty five fugitives were

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consigned to the flames. Sixteen sinners were jailed for life, and "innumerable
others," the early accounts tell us, were condemned to perpetual exile and
confiscation of all property. Not one single per:son was reconciled to the Faith.
So pleased was our Lady with the good work that Her image at Guadalupe began
spewing forth miracles in such prodigious quantities that Inquisitor Sanchez,
trying to record them for posterity, broke down from writer's cramp.

Into this den of virtue came a frightened Beatriz Nunez in January, 1485, seeking
the mercy promised under the Edict of Grace. She confessed at length about her
earlier Judaizing years in Ciudad Real, listing many specific details and adding
that she had practiced "all the other ceremonies" of Judaism. In Guadalupe, she
went on, her new husband's heretical misfortunes had made her much more cautious.
Here she practiced Judaism in secret to avoid her husband's frightened anger,
the servants' prying eyes, and embarrassing questions from her children. Even so,
she managed a few Judaizing accomplishments: she avoided pork and fish without
scales, she removed the fat from meat, she begged off housework on Saturdays,
and even observed "several" Jewish Fast days. Furthermore, Beatriz freely
admitted, she would have lived like a full-time Jewess if she hadn't been afraid
of being found out. Now, however, she saw the error of her heretical ways and
repented of her sins, begging forgiveneSs and seeking reconciliation under the
terms of the Edict of Grace. Beatriz then concluded with the following pathetic
plea to her judges:

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And because my memory is poor and it is possible that I have erred in other
things which I do not at the moment recall over such a long period of time or
because I am so upset, I protest before your Lordships that if I should remember
anything else, I will immediately come forward to declare it and to ask penance
for it. And to cleanse myself further I hereby state that if any persons have or
shall come forth to declare anything against me in addition to what I have
already confessed, and if they are persons in whom your Lordships have
confidence, then I confess beforehand that whatever they may say is true and I
ask penance for it, submitting myself at all times to the correction of the Holy
Mother Church.

Even friar Nuno was satisfied, at least for the moment, with this confession, and
Beatriz Nunez was formally reconciled to the True Faith and set free. A few weeks
later she was picked up on orders of friar Nuno and imprisoned for trial as a
false penitent and deceiver of the Holy Office.

Beatriz had obviously been deluding herself with the notion that she had
concealed her evil secrets from the help. Seven garrulous maids from the Nunez
household-champions of the Faith all-came forward to contribute heretical scraps
for the new case against their mistress. These were carefully pieced together by
the Inquisition prosecutor into a formal accusation demanding that Beatriz Nunez
be burned at the stake on the ground that she had omitted the following details
from her voluntary confession:

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(1) She bathed during her period.
(2) She participated in Jewish funeral rites.
(3) She blessed her children without crossing herself.
(4) She indoctrinated her children in Judaism, and washed off the oil of their
Christian baptism.
(5) She ate meat only when prepared in the Jewish fashion.
(6) She confessed that in Ciudad Real she used to light candles on Friday nights,
remove the sciatic nerve from the leg of meat, and prepare Saturday's meal on
Friday. She did not, however, confess that she had also done these things in
Guadalupe.

The substance of Beatriz' defense appears sound enough. She pointed out that she
had already confessed to observing all the Jewish practices she thought she could
hide, and to a desire to follow them all. She had also admitted that her faulty
memory and personal agitation undoubtedly made> her leave out some details about
her errors of the past twenty years, and she had even confessed beforehand to the
truth of any future denunciations which might include specific details she had
forgotten herself. It was on this basis, Beatriz reminded her captors, that she
had been forgiven and reconciled to the Faith by the Inquisitors themselves.
Even the zealous friar Nuno was sensitive to the legal niceties of this case. If
Beatriz were to be burned-a foregone conclusion-it would have to be done
according

1. Although this was not a Jewish religious custom, it apparently was a practice
abhorred by orthodox Christians.

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to the rules. And the rules required that she make a specific confession that
she had deliberately withheld important information in her original confession.
Fortunately the machinery of torture was always available to solve such knotty
problems as these. Beatriz was therefore stretched out on the rack where, with
the help of the Inquisitors, she blurted out a suitably incriminating confession
and once more begged mercy for her sins. This time, however, her plea was denied.
For, as the prosecutor pointed out, she had confessed her misdeeds only when no
other course was open to her. Therefore, it was clear that she was not truly
contrite or repentant. Therefore, it was equally clear that she was an impenitent
heretic. Therefore, she should be burned at the stake. Therefore, Beatriz Nunez
was burned at the stake July 23, 1485.